Busted Flush Read online

  Back at the game, Pham said, “I’ll take that action.” He dropped a few bills on the table. “Bet the octopus outlasts the chubby kid Justice brought in a few weeks ago.”

  Drake . . . ? A cold, sickly feeling took root in Niobe’s gut. Why would they say that?

  Zen, that’s enough. C’mon back now.

  I’ll get him! I’ll drift right into his body and—

  No. Leave him alone. That goes for all three of you.

  Zane ruffled his tentacles. His sisters nodded.

  I need to think for a while.

  He was asleep the next time they came for him, although the dreams kept him from sleeping very well. Drake didn’t really know if it was day or night. There was no clock in his room and he’d watched all the DVDs, some more than once.

  Drake could barely feel his feet on the floor as they shuffled him down the hall in the direction of the interrogation room; Justice seemed to be lifting him more than guiding him. Once there, it was going to be more of the same stupid questions and he really couldn’t tell them anything.

  Smitty and Dr. Pendergast were waiting for them inside the interrogation room. There was someone else, a woman who was about the same age as his teachers back at school. Her dark hair was pulled back and her eyes darted around the room like a fish in an aquarium. Drake flopped heavily into the empty chair and put his head onto the desktop. “Please let me leave. I can’t help you.” He closed his eyes, hoping it would all just go away.

  “We’re going to try something different this time, Drake,” Smitty said, in his flat but somehow scary voice. “Something to help you remember. Your file from BAMC indicates a reaction to a particular type of sedative. Dr. Carlisle will be sitting next to you while you’re under. She has the ability to see into your mind somewhat and will share that with us.”

  Dr. Carlisle pulled up a chair next to him. Pendergast moved around the table and stood by Drake’s other side, a hypodermic in one hand. He grabbed Drake firmly by the shoulder, and before the boy could struggle had the needle into him.

  “You may feel a little uncomfortable for a moment,” the doctor said, “but . . .”

  The rest of the sentence was a hopeless garble to Drake, like someone was speaking a foreign language to him from inside a well. The room tipped and rolled beneath him. The light over the table dimmed and went out, and it seemed he was falling slowly into a dark hole filled with cotton candy, but the hole didn’t have a bottom. He closed his eyes.

  This wasn’t like the dreams. It felt like someone pushing open his mind and chipping bits of it loose.

  He was sitting at the computer playing WoW . . . His brother Bob was behind him, yelling, saying it was his turn . . . Drake hitting the floor, coming up punching wildly . . . one flailing fist catching Bob in the balls . . . Bob choking him and demanding that he give . . . Drake trying to get air any way he could, no air . . . Bob saying “What’s wrong with your eyes?” . . . Drake feeling like he was growing . . . A flash of light, blinding, blotting out Bob, and Sareena downstairs, and his mom and dad out by the stock pond . . . A feeling of collapsing, darkness . . .

  Where was he?

  Drake opened his eyes again, back in the interrogation room. His head was over a trash can and he was throwing up. Drake couldn’t believe how much was coming out of him. He hadn’t been eating much lately.

  “That’s all right, Drake,” Pendergast said. “That’s what it’s there for.”

  Smitty glanced up from the notebook he was writing in. Dr. Carlisle was whispering in his ear. She looked scared. “Get him out of here,” Smitty said. “We’re done for now.”

  Drake tried to get to his feet, but his thick legs were wobbly beneath him. “What did you do to me? Does this go away?”

  Dr. Pendergast handed him a glass of water. “You’ll feel better if you get some of this down.” Drake took this glass in an unsteady hand and balanced it against his lip, gulping down as much as he could. At least it took a little of the vomit taste from his mouth.

  When he was finished, Justice tugged at him. “Time to get back to your room, Drake.”

  Drake tried to take a step but lost his footing and collapsed face-first to the floor. His forehead bounced heavily off the cold linoleum. Smitty laughed. Drake clamped his jaw shut. He wasn’t going to let them get him to go emo if he could help it. At least whatever they’d drugged him with dulled the pain as well as making him a spaz.

  Justice lifted Drake up by his armpits. “Shut up, Smitty.” He glared at his fellow BICC agent.

  “Thanks,” Drake said. “I’m okay now.” It was a lie, but he was going to do his best to pull it off. He could tell that Justice wasn’t taking up for him because he liked Drake. It was because he thought Smitty was a jerk-off. It was one of the few things they agreed on.

  On the way back to his room Drake tried to get Justice to tell him what they’d injected him with, not to mention what it had done to him. As expected, Justice told Drake exactly nothing except that it was an advanced interrogation technique. Justice gave Drake a stick of gum when they got back, “to take the taste out of his mouth.” Then he left Drake alone again.

  Drake lay on his bed, chewing the gum slowly to keep the taste for as long as possible. As near as he could tell, they were going to keep him here forever. All he knew was that he had to get out of here soon, and he was going to need help. Major help.

  Niobe, Zoë, and Zane pretended to watch American Hero in the lounge while Zenobia snuck into Pendergast’s office. Zane chuckled (in the form of cyan and burgundy cross-hatching) when the Laureate, the weakest of the competing aces, managed to get Tesseract, the most powerful, voted off the show. Team Clubs was screwed.

  Niobe turned inward, focused on Zenobia. The filing cabinet was locked. Zenobia reached inside with a phantom finger and tripped the latch. It took a bit of searching to find Drake’s file.

  Got it, Mom. Zenobia pulled out a thin hanging folder. The tab said “Thomas, Drake.”

  Good job, kiddo. Don’t keep me in suspense.

  Zenobia started reading. “No. Freaking. Way.”

  Drake was, apparently, the only survivor of the accident in Texas that had been on the news. An Air Force reconnaissance patrol had found him, naked but otherwise apparently healthy, near the center of the devastation. SCARE suspected that Drake had played a role in the event. Whatever it had been, it wasn’t a grain silo explosion.

  A page slipped out of the folder and fluttered to Zenobia’s feet. It was the end of an e-mail. Pendergast believed in paper trails, apparently, and kept hard copies of everything.

  In a report to his superiors in Washington, Pendergast had concluded: “ . . . constant danger to this facility, its staff, and the other patients. As the trump virus has failed, I see no choice but to euthanize the subject.”

  My God. Reading those words revived the sickly feeling in Niobe’s gut. The newest entry in Drake’s file, dated that morning, recommended that he be moved to the deepest part of Q Sector for “containment” in case of an accident. Pendergast stressed the importance of keeping Drake calm—which Niobe found at odds with tossing him in BICC’s worst neighborhood—until he could be subtly euthanized. Pendergast suggested piping carbon monoxide into Drake’s new cell.

  The television blared. Zane jumped. Pham, a player in Christian’s secret mistigris game, had picked up the television remote and was cranking the volume.

  “Hey, not so loud!” Loud!-loud!-loud!-loud! . . .

  He ignored Zoë’s echoing protest, plopped down in a recliner, and tore open a bag of corn chips. Niobe hoped his lewd fantasies of superpowered starlets would distract him from wondering where her third child had gone.

  Pham shifted around in the chair, trying to get comfortable. After a moment he grunted, unhooked the jangly key ring from his belt, and tossed it on a side table.

  “Mom.” Om-om-om-om. Zoë whispered, “It’s too loud for Zane.” Ane-ane-ane-ane-ane . . .

  “Hush, kiddo. Don’t make me lose m
y train of thought.”

  Zen, can you put Drake’s file back and pull mine?

  The file marked “Winslow, Niobe” was twice as thick as any other. It began with a capsule biography summarizing her life, the long journey from a Connecticut mansion to a subterranean government laboratory.

  Next, the file detailed every child she hatched at BICC: photographs, medical examinations, descriptions of their abilities. But they weren’t catalogued by name. The paperwork reduced each child to a serial number, starting with 1-A-1 for her darling and dearly missed little strongman Aaron, all the way to 1-Z-3 for Zenobia.

  Like Drake’s, Niobe’s file contained Pendergast’s handwritten observations. Not long after her admission to the facility, Pendergast had enthused to his superiors: “The subject’s unprecedented ability to circumvent the natural statistics of the wild card virus, most notably the routine suppression of the Black Queen among her hatchlings, presents tremendous possibilities. Isolating the mechanism should be our highest priority.”

  Back in the lounge, Niobe hugged Zane and Zoë to her. Zenobia kept reading.

  Unraveling the peculiarities of Niobe’s children had proven difficult. Slow progress dampened Pendergast’s tone. Six months in, he’d become paranoid that Niobe might decide to leave the facility before BICC could achieve its research goals. He’d had her elevator card deactivated, and as a further precaution he’d filed papers with SCARE.

  She’d been a prisoner for over a year and hadn’t known.

  Six months after that, he’d written: “We have met with moderate success extending the mean hatchling life span. If more resources are devoted to this work, future clutches may be turned into deployable assets. In this vein, the subject should be utilized as a biological reactor until reliable suppression of the Black Queen has been achieved.”

  Niobe hugged her children until they gasped. Reactor? That’s all I am? An egg factory? You want to turn my children into weapons?

  Zoë huddled closer to her mother. Mom, what are they going to do to us? It was hard to believe she could sound so quiet, so mousy, so frightened.

  Niobe didn’t know what to say.

  Zenobia read further. Pendergast had been reading all of Niobe’s incoming and outgoing e-mails. Her correspondence with Bubbles prompted lengthy and graphic speculations on Niobe’s sexuality.

  The final entry, dated two days earlier, was terse: “Fulfilling our research objectives will require several hundred clutches. Recommend accelerated schedule, with multiple partners.” A chart accompanied this note. Pendergast intended to pair her not only with nats, but also with aces, deuces, and jokers. Including some from Q Sector. “Staff should develop techniques for forced insemination should subject prove uncooperative.”

  Niobe shivered. The entire family fell silent. Niobe wiped at her face, flicking away tears before Pham or another orderly noticed.

  Zane rode on her shoulder as they walked back to her quarters. The picture frames on her shelves rattled when the door slammed shut behind her. Her children—row upon row of them—smiled, grinned, mugged, gave the thumbs-up from dozens of photographs. The picture frame on her desk housed an autographed photo of Michelle Pond. Two photos cropped side by side, in fact, contrasting thin Bubbles and large Bubbles.

  Niobe clicked the remote for her stereo. The little Bose player was plugged into her iPod. Haunting vocals and mournful guitars echoed from the cinder-block walls and wrapped around Niobe like an acoustic blanket. Espers’s “Children of Stone” had become her anthem the moment she first heard it. Stone children never age, never die.

  She flopped down on her bed and cried. Christian’s betrayal had been painful enough. Two years. Two years, she had let them poke her, prod her, humiliate her, all in the stupid belief that they wanted to cure her children. But they didn’t give a shit about any of that.

  She felt stupid. Ashamed.

  They were going to chain her to a table and use her like a machine. But not before they murdered Drake.

  Zoë and Zane climbed into her lap. Zane, a mournful cobalt blue with spots of jade, nuzzled her hand. Zoë’s tears, hot with sorrow, trickled down Niobe’s neck. They sat that way until Zenobia said, Uh, Mom?

  She had unlocked the lower compartment of Pendergast’s TV cabinet. The shelves were crammed with DVDs. Many had austere white labels on the spine: “Genetrix Insemination Session, 1-H,” and so forth. But others had garish sleeves plastered with titles such as “All Joker Action,” “Tentacle Tramps,” and “Herne Takes Jokertown, volume 3.”

  Mom, there’s magazines here, too, with—

  Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

  She’d thought nothing could be worse than how he viewed Niobe and her children as tools, means to an end. She was wrong. He spent half his time jacking off to her sessions and the other half trying to turn her children into weapons.

  She felt filthy.

  “Mom,” Zoë whispered, “we can’t stay here.”

  Niobe blew her nose. “If we leave, you’ll get sick.” She didn’t add “soon.” “If we stay, you have a chance.”

  “No.” Zenobia shook her head. “No we don’t. A few extra weeks at best.”

  Her siblings agreed. “Besides.” Ides-ides-ides-ides. “Drake needs our help.” Elp-elp-elp-elp-elp-elp.

  His arm still hurt from the shot they’d given him. Whatever it was supposed to do, it hadn’t worked, and the doctors weren’t happy about it. Justice had him in tow again. The hallway they’d entered was blue and the doorway to it had two heavy bolts on the outside.

  “Is that you again, spic?” a voice came from deep inside one of the rooms. Drake couldn’t see inside because the heavily barred window was too high. Justice didn’t reply and kept walking.

  A horrible face appeared at another one of the windows. It was gray and the mouth had huge teeth. “Love to eat them fat boys. Fat boys what I love to eat. Bite they fat-boy heads off. Nibble on they fat-boy feet.” The voice put a cold knot in Drake’s stomach.

  “Why are you putting me in here with them?” he asked.

  “It won’t be for long, Drake. That much I promise you.” Justice unbolted the door to an empty room and herded Drake inside. There was a bed, a toilet, and not much more. Justice closed and bolted the door in place. His footfalls receded evenly down the hallway.

  “Love to eat them fat boys.” There was a laugh that sounded like gravel being poured down a garbage disposal.

  Drake sat down on the hard, lumpy bed and closed his eyes. There had to be a way to make all this go away.

  Zane waited in the television lounge, mimicking the color and wood-grain pattern on one of the tables. The same table where Pham tossed his key ring when he watched TV. He didn’t notice when his keys disappeared.

  Good work, Zane! I’m proud of you, said Niobe. Okay, you two, it’s your turn.

  They had until the end of Pham’s break, a little under half an hour. Niobe headed for Q Sector. She stifled the urge to run. Hurrying would arouse suspicion.

  Meanwhile, Zoë and Zenobia crept toward the central guard station. Zoë hid around the corner while her wraith-sister drifted down the corridor to take a position under the console. She studied the controls until she found the switch that unlocked Drake’s cell.

  Ready, Mom?

  Ready, kiddo.

  Zenobia flipped the switch. K-chunk. A four-inch steel bolt slammed into the solenoid situated on the outside of Drake’s door.

  Niobe tiptoed inside. “Psst, Drake,” she whispered. “It’s me, Niobe.” She nudged his shoulder. “Wake up.”

  “Go ’way. Sleeping.”

  “It’s Niobe. Please, get up. It’s important.”

  A heavy sigh. “Fine.”

  Drake sat up, a sad and pudgy figure in his underwear. His hair was pressed flat on one side and sticking straight up on the other.

  She licked her thumb and wiped little crumbs of sleep from his eyes. He pulled away. “What?”

  “Get dressed, kiddo. We’re leaving.�
�

  His eyes opened a little wider. “What?”

  Niobe opened the bag she carried and yanked out shirts, pants, socks, and underwear. “Do you like it here?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you’re gonna like it here even less when you find out what they have in store for you.” She handed him the bundle of clothes, then looked away while he changed. “They’re gonna hurt you, Drake.”

  “Done.”

  “Here,” she said, pulling a handful of cotton balls from her pocket. “Shove these in your ears.”

  Drake looked at her. “Are you nuts?”

  “Trust me.” She winked.

  “Why should I?”

  “Please? Just take them.”

  She held her hand out to him. Slowly, reluctantly, he took the cotton, but he didn’t put it in his ears.

  “What now?”

  “Now we wait.”

  Now it was up to Zane. Pham’s key ring would unlock the elevator, but Zane had to get there first. There was a limit to how quickly he could shift his coloring. He could make other things invisible, but not himself.

  Niobe watched through his eyes as he snuck through the complex. Twice he had to stop in plain sight while orderlies and security techs made their rounds.

  Ten minutes until the end of Pham’s break. Five.

  The elevator doors came into sight at the end of a long corridor. Close enough for government work.

  “Get ready, Drake.”

  Zen, now.

  Zenobia, still hunched under the central guard station, reached through the console with ghost fingers to flip a row of bright red toggle switches.

  Click, click, click-click-click-click.

  Cell doors started to open throughout the medium- and high-security wings of the facility.

  “What the—” The security tech immediately slammed the switches back. Zenobia reflipped them from her vantage inside the console, and then trashed the wiring.